Sunday, August 22, 2010

Birthday Card Fail! Drawing #7, #8, #9, #10

For my last birthday, my girlfriend's 8 year old daughter, Mika, gave me a birthday card she put a lot of work into. I felt I needed to do the same for her, and gave her the biggest fail card ever.

I had a vision for this card. She loves the Zelda games on her Nintendo DS, so I figured I would draw her as Link in my favorite style:

I would even draw our dog, Hurley, flying above her as a fairy.

This should have been pretty easy. I got out my sketchbook, and started trying to draw her in some sort of action pose.

First I thought her swinging down on a rope would be cool...

It never looked right to me. So I thought I would try just using an action pose I found of a knight wielding a sword, and translate it.

Okay that looks even more fucked, and I couldn't figure what to do with the arm NOT wielding the sword.

Fuck it. I'll just draw her standing and smilling. Yeah.

So there I had my rough pose. Now I could redraw it, tighter, on the card stock I had. Face was a little wonky, but I was pretty sure I could fix it. I only had ONE piece of card stock, so it had to be perfect the first try.

So I redrew the drawing and I liked it. I fixed the parts I didn't like in the rough, and it just had an over all stronger pose. (sorry no pic for this)

I now had to color it in. I borrowed some crayons, and looking at the assorted colors, figured this could look really cool.

I hadn't used crayons since I was 6. Holy fuck they suck. The Crayons smeared the pencil. When I tried to fix the pencil by erasing it, it smeared black. I tried to cover the black with more crayon - press harder with the crayon... it just looked awful.

So I figured I would just take my pen I use to doodle with, and black ink it... try to save it with a good outline. Well that didn't work either. The wax from the crayon gimped up the pen.

So I grabbed a sharpie! That will fix it!

The sharpie looked like ass.

I looked at it finished and was sad. the original, decent sketch was gone. I didn't even bother adding in Hurley.

I was thinking of throwing it out, but then realized I wouldn't have a chance to make another. I decided to give it to her anyways, and wrote "Happy Birthday" on it... but I didn't plan ahead and had to cram the "day" of "Birthday" tight together in the end.

The face looks flat and wonky! Sure, part of this was having to use a sharpie, thus giving her wonky eyes, but still...

And is that a shadow, or is she hovering over a hole and about to fall?

Maybe!

Oh well.

I filled in the rest of the card...

Yeah... Sorry about the CAR Mika... I even SPELLED "Card" wrong. Oh, I also missed the "n" in "would't"

A MILLION!?!?! I thought it was ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND!??!?

You're RIGHT! In my search for the famous Chuck Jones quote about bad drawings, I consistently found it quoted as " Everyone has a million bad drawings in them...". It turns out Chuck Jones was quoting his teacher, and his his teacher had told him that everyone has "one hundred thousand" in them...

However, I consider myself a pretty crappy artist, and I probably have more than a hundred thousand bad drawings in me. So this blog is my attempt to get the MILLION bad drawings out of my system and be an AWESOME artist. This may never happen. A million drawings is a lot. But "A Million Bad Drawings" has a better ring to it than "One Hundred Thousand Bad Drawings", right?

I should note that I generally hate everything I draw, and I'm not fishing for compliments. "That's not bad!" does not help me. Critique does! Critique away! Let me know what I'm doing wrong. You won't hurt my feelings. Asshole.